Pros:

Cons:

Burnout 3: Takedown marked a turning point for the Burnout series. Shifting from a focus on just driving very fast and very dangerously to include a spotlight on sheer destruction, Takedown brought the long-simmering series to an awesome boil. On both PS2 and PSP, Dominator forsakes most of the changes made in Takedown and Revenge. Rivals are in, but crash mode is out. Crashbreaker is in, but it feels less powerful. Aftertouch is in, but traffic checking is out. Rather than another true entry in the series, Dominator is a simple C-grade mashup.

Two Steps Back... Did We Miss Something?

The game's core isn't horrible. It's the same basic gameplay that guided Burnout and Burnout 2. A wide variety of unlockable cars await you, as well as a brand-new World Tour to take apart track by track. The series' signature Boost meter, the fiery indicator of the quantity and quality of your dangerous driving in a race, is once again a fixed bar. How many opponents you've taken down and your own number of crashes no longer increases or decreases its length. This does put the focus back on dangerous driving. Once again, being a true Burnout ace requires true driving skill, not just murderous impulses. You really do need to spend most of your time in the oncoming traffic's lane, dancing as closely as possible between incoming cars, and taking your killshots when you can get them.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Maniac mode, an entire game mode built up around the return of the burnout. A burnout (in Burnout) is when you manage to totally fill your boost meter and then burn through the whole thing in one fell swoop. A burnout chain occurs when you do enough crazy driving during a burnout to fill the meter again, and, like some sort of suicidal person, kick into another burnout. The more burnouts you get in a chain, the higher the point multipliers go. That means you're not just driving like a maniac, but a maniac who is boosting all the time. Nearly the exact opposite of cathartic modes like Traffic Check and Crash, Maniac mode will make you a Burnout expert if it doesn't make you quit in frustration. But after the simple fun of the series' last entries, quitting something this stressful seems like a valid choice.

Also, look again at the cons up there. Unlike Burnout 3, there's no online multiplayer here. Nothing but offline for the PS2 and ad hoc for the PSP. These aren't technical limits; these are exclusions to make the game cheaper to make and maintain. Visually, at least, there's no real downgrade here from previous titles.

EA can say that the decision to exclude a Crash mode allowed the developers to focus on the racing. From a smaller publisher, that would even be believable. But frankly, EA has the resources to have given the dev team enough time to sneak Crash mode in here. And if the dev team didn't feel like it, EA has the clout to demand it. The real problem here isn't the focus on careful driving at incredible speeds. The problem is that the changes are made at the expense of the series' evolution in its last few titles, without giving the consumer any other options. How about a set of options to shift from "classic" to "revenge" style racing? How about Crash mode, the most distinctive feature of the series? How about not cranking out a sequel as quickly as possible to make sure it hits the PS2 before the platform's death throes finish, and to make sure the PSP gets one as often as possible?

Burnout 3 was a title that changed peoples' tune from "I don't play racing games" to "No, you can't have the controller. It's still my turn." Compared to that, Dominator just isn't as fun. If you head to a major retailer today, you can pick up Burnout: Dominator for about forty bucks, PSP or PS2. Or you could drop just under fifty bucks and get Burnout Legends, Burnout 3: Takedown, and Burnout 2: Point of Impact. That's roughly the same experience, but with a lot more game to play. You'll miss out on Maniac mode, but you'll have Crash mode, which is (scientifically) eight hundred times better. It's not a very tough call.